


In natura

by Lexie



Series: In Spite of Ourselves [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 12:58:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexie/pseuds/Lexie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The people who thought it was a great idea to build an Anti-Kaiju Wall and go hide inland are the same people making the big decisions after the Breach is closed. </p><p>Or: how Hermann Gottlieb smuggled his own data out of the Hong Kong Shatterdome and Newt Geiszler learned to love the global arms race.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In natura

**Author's Note:**

> "Science is something to be proud of; it allows us to understand the world in spite of ourselves." Thanks for the series title inspiration/lifespiration, Neil deGrasse Tyson! Also thanks to Jacee for reading this and holding my hand a lot. First in a two-part series; this part is gen, but the next part is not!

Newt wakes up with a hangover the size of a small moon, a mouth that tastes like what kaiju blue does to organic matter, and somebody pounding on his door. Which is a pretty impressive feat, considering that this is an underground military bunker and that door is at least two feet of reinforced steel, but Newt is feeling way too non-functional to be impressed. He has been asleep for _maybe_ ten minutes.

The hammering continues. He lifts his head. Apparently, he passed out spreadeagled on his stomach with his shoes on, one leg and an arm hanging off the bed, and the lights blazing. His glasses are crooked on his face and the rim of the intact lens is digging into his cheek.

“Dr. Geiszler?” calls a muffled voice, and then the banging starts up again.

Newt lurches up, rolls off the bed, gets a leg tangled in the unused sheets and almost topples over, and staggers to the door. When he throws it open and demands, “ _What!_ ” he finds himself facing an unfamiliar woman in some kind of PPDC uniform. She’s standing in the middle of the hall, where she’d clearly flung herself to avoid the door swinging at her, and she’s staring at him.

“—What?” Newt asks, a little milder and more puzzled, if still put-upon. After a second, he looks down at himself. Right. The dried blood and sweat and kaiju viscera, all on top of a sweet canvas of ripped clothes and broken glasses.

The officer rallies, and comes closer. “Dr. Geiszler,” she says, very cautiously, “we’re looking for senior staff who were present at the battle of Hong Kong and are available to speak to the media.” She looks dubious about the prospect even as she says it.

“What?” Newt says, one more time. He blinks. He feels like his eyes are stuck together with sleepy crud and god knows what else. His brain is trying to throb out of his skull. Is he hallucinating this? He might be hallucinating this.

“Rangers Mori and Becket requested time to recuperate before giving interviews, and Marshal Hanson—”

‘Time to recuperate’? _That_ sounds nice; why can’t he... Abruptly, Newt realizes what’s being asked of him, and why.

“Oh,” he says. “Uh, yeah, okay; yeah, let me just—” He makes like he’s going to step out the door, and the officer’s face twists up.

“Dr. Geiszler,” she says. “You have time for a shower.”

“But not time to sleep?” he tries. The sleeping was an actual medical directive, after the bewildered medical team had put him and Hermann through a battery of brain scans and had given them tentatively-clean bills of health. ‘I don’t think anything’s wrong with you, aside from your blood pressure and what you’re doing to _my_ blood pressure; get the fuck out of here and go sleep’ is definitely the best doctor’s order Newt has ever received.

“You’ve been sleeping for a day and a half,” the PPDC officer says, and then she finishes, “I’ll be back in 20 minutes,” and leaves Newt to blink stupidly in her wake.

“A day and a half?” he says to the empty corridor. Come to think of it, he doesn’t hear the sounds of loud revelry echoing from the jaeger bays, anymore. “What the hell?”

* * *

By the time Newt has taken a shower, popped a couple pills, found his spare pair of glasses, and changed his clothes, he feels like a new man, or at least one who isn’t half-dead. His harried escort introduces herself as Second Officer Matapang. Newt didn’t even think they _had_ ranks in the PPDC, but she stares at him when he says that, so they move past it.

Officer Matapang explains as they go. She’s basically herding him along the halls like she’s a tiny shepherd and he’s a particularly stupid sheep, and he would be vaguely insulted, but he’s way too exhausted for that kind of effort. “People want to hear from personnel who were on the front lines, so Jason Sanchez from ZZN is here with a crew and they’re going to tape an interview live.”

“What, live? No pressure!” Newt says, but he’s already starting to perk up.

Then they turn the corner and there are bright lights and cameras, focused on a couple of chairs settled together in a particularly photogenic corner of the empty bay. Hermann is standing uncomfortably off to the side of the chaos.

Newt says, “ _Really?_ ” but, if he’s being seriously honest with himself, it’s for show. Hermann did something completely insane and awesome with him, what-feels-like-an-hour-but-was-apparently-a-day-and-a-half-ago, and he prevented Newt from, like, shorting out his brain, so Newt’s still feeling pretty charitable.

Plus, it turns out that it’s a lot harder to feel any kind of genuine all-consuming hatred toward somebody after you drift with them. Go figure.

“Took you long enough,” grumbles Hermann. He looks even more dour and sour-faced than usual. There’s something beautiful about that: no matter how much the world shifts on its axis, Hermann is still a giant prune in a sweater vest.

“Hermann!” Newt greets cheerfully, and before Hermann can make his usual complaint about the lack of title, he claps him on the shoulder — Hermann shoots him a look, eyes narrowed — and keeps going. “Had to get my beauty rest, dude.”

He snorts. His right eye is still blood-red. “If beauty was the aim, I’d suggest going back to bed.”

Newt rolls his eyes. Hermann thinks he’s so clever when he gets those little jibes in. “I’m offended,” he says, deadpan; “you— Holy shit there’s coffee.” He scrambles for the coffee table and dumps the necessary ingredients into a styrofoam cup within the space of about four seconds. He hisses and flicks hot coffee off his fingers after a few drops land astray, but it’s still, after he lifts it to his mouth and takes the first sip, completely perfect.

He turns back toward the corner of the bay that he’d come from, both hands wrapped around his coffee. Officer Matapang is gone and Hermann’s still standing there awkwardly, alone. He looks like he got hit by a truck and dragged under it for a while, and then was awake for, like, four days straight. Newt is simultaneously gratified that it’s not just him, and a little disturbed.

Newt looks back down at the table — which, who brings a craft services table to a military base two days after the apocalypse was barely stopped? ZZN, apparently.

He twists his mouth up wryly at what he wants to do, and then he sighs, sets his cup of coffee aside (it’s basically a cup of cream with some coffee sprinkled on top), and pours a cup of black coffee with exactly half a packet of sugar. He takes both back across the bay, and he hands Hermann the second cup. Or he tries to hand it to Hermann, anyway; Hermann just looks at Newt strangely when Newt says, “Here,” and he doesn’t reach out to take it.

Newt jiggles the cup impatiently, putting their shoes in danger. “Waiting on you here, chief.”

Hermann grabs it out of his hand. “...Thank you,” he says stiffly. He looks surprised when he takes the first sip. It's a stupid reaction; how he takes his coffee is basically the _least_ intimate thing that Newt learned in the Drift.

“How’d they talk _you_ into this?” Newt asks.

“They told me if I didn’t come on, you’d be doing a live worldwide television interview, unsupervised,” says Hermann, over the rim of his cup.

“ ‘Unsupervised’? What am I, 12? Come on, it’s gonna be fine.”

Hermann shoots him a sharp, doubting look.

Officer Matapang comes to them just before the cameras turns on and says, "Now don't worry, you're going to be great. Just keep the classified material under your hats, okay?" and then walks away.

Hermann looks like he’s about to vibrate right out of his chair. “What?” he says, as the cameraman begins a countdown from ten. “Is the entirety of Operation Pitfall still classified?” The second officer is still moving away from them, now talking on her radio. The news crew continues bustling; the reporter is sitting across from them, deep in conversation with his producer. Hermann demands, “What are they expecting us to talk about if Operation Pitfall is still classified?!”

“Nothing, it’s fine, we’ll figure it out,” Newt says dismissively, tapping on the tiny microphone clipped to his shirt collar.

“Three, two, one,” says the cameraman, as Hermann says, “It's not _nothing_ , I don't know what we’re not—”

The lights go very, very bright. “This is Jason Sanchez with ZZN reporting live from Hong Kong,” the reporter says, “where just 12 short hours ago, the successful mission to close the Breach was launched.

“Here with me today are Dr. Newton Geiszler and Dr. Hermann Gottlieb of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps Kaiju Science division, who worked in the Hong Kong Shatterdome. Gentlemen, good evening. Thank you for your service and for being here with us tonight.”

“It’s not—” Hermann says.

“Hi,” says Newt, waving at the camera.

That’s pretty representative of how the interview goes.

For every question that Newt tries to answer, Hermann manages to cut him off at the knees and give prickly, evasive responses that avoid specifics. So, obviously, Newt baits him into arguing with him instead, which has the added bonus, he figures, of pelting the viewers with information.

Jason Sanchez clearly has no idea what to do with them and spends most of his time trying to drag them back on topic while desperately eyeballing his producer.

The second interview is with a station that Newt thinks he saw a couple billboards for, while he was running for his life through Hong Kong. The interviewer is a perfect lady in a pink suit and the highest heels he’s ever seen, and she keeps firmly interrupting the two of them when they start to go off on tangents. Newt thinks that if she could get away with grabbing him by the ear on broadcast television, she’d totally do it.

Officer Matapang reappears in the middle of that interview, finally off her radio. Newt only notices her behind the ring of cameras because Hermann is blathering about the Fibonacci sequence and the significance of numbers and Newt is flapping his hand and rolling his eyes at the nearest camera.

Officer Matapang looks horrified. Her eyes are wide and she’s shaking her head and furiously drawing her index finger across her throat.

Newt magnanimously decides to throw her — and the poor translator who’s going to have to put Chinese subtitles on this entire interview — a bone. “Hey,” he says, nudging Hermann to interrupt him. “Ms. Cheung’s trying to ask another question, here.”

If looks could kill, Newt wouldn’t have made it past his fifteenth birthday; he was a little shit of epic proportions. But if they _could_ , this is yet another moment where he’d drop dead where he’s sitting, courtesy of Hermann Gottlieb.

“Thank you, Dr. Geiszler,” says Charlene Cheung Mei, sitting in the reporter’s chair across from them. She looks frustrated. She’s already lasted longer than the first interviewer, though, and Newt’s a little in love with how scary she is, so points for Charlene Cheung Mei. “Doctors, you have to know that this is the question on everyone’s minds: is the Kaiju War over?”

“What, you mean are they coming back?” Newt asks, and when the reporter nods, he says, “It’s impossible to say for sure,” and as Hermann nods beside him, he hears a voice say, “Whoa!” and then start speaking in very, very fast Cantonese. Officer Matapang, now arguing with the producer, apparently (a) speaks a million languages, and (b) doesn’t like this line of questioning.

“Destroying the throat and collapsing the Breach was an impressive victory, but there are too many variables to make an accurate prediction for the future,” says Hermann. “We don’t know the size of the Anteverse, how the physics of an explosion would function inside, how great their numbers wer—”

He stops short. Newt follows his stare, and finds that Officer Matapang has pushed the camera down. “What do you think you're doing?” she demands.

“Uh, answering questions!” Newt retorts.

“Wrong,” she says. “Panicking the entire world. Interview over.”

The interview with Jason Sanchez, who stuck to the pre-approved questions, airs live. The interview with Charlene Cheung Mei does not. It gets chopped up into tiny sound bites before it finally goes out to the general public late that night. Her last question is conspicuously absent.

 _Somebody_ clearly hears about it, though, because the next day, they’re hauled in front of a long table of PPDC personnel in uniforms, UN representatives in suits lined up on the flatscreens behind them, and are told to explain exactly what the hell happened over the last few weeks.

They tell the story, tripping all over each other but getting it done: Hermann's calculations, Newt's initial drift and the realization that this was a clone army bent on humanity’s extinction, the second drift, the breakdown of the throat, and what they'd witnessed of Striker Eureka and Gipsy Danger's last stand from the LOCCENT.

The very first official question, in the following Q&A session, is whether the kaiju will be back.

“Oh, are we allowed to answer that now?” Newt asks.

Hermann ignores Newt’s simmering hostility, sets his jaw, and says, “If they survived the detonation: most likely, yes.”

There’s a soft susurration of clothes and paper rustling with sudden movement; of low voices.

“Dr. Geiszler?”

“Yep,” says Newt. “The hive mind was incredibly focused and driven. If they can open a new portal and destroy us all, they’re definitely gonna go for it.”

“That seems like a substantial ‘if,’ gentlemen. What are you basing this information on?”

Newt isn’t even paying attention to who’s asking the questions, frankly; they’re mostly coming from the UN representatives, who are a blurred wall of faces.

“Ten years of experience in studying kaiju and predicting their movements,” Hermann snaps.

“And the Drift,” Newt adds. “Maybe you remember it, that thing that put us directly in their heads so we knew what they were planning?”

“And yet you don't know if Gipsy Danger's self destruction destroyed them,” says a man from the wall of screens.

“It was — it was, it was _flashes_ , okay?! Impressions and feelings from a totally alien hive mind of, like, _millions_ of kaiju, against two tiny little human brains. So I'm _sorry_ ,” (he’s not sorry, and everyone in the room knows it), “if I don't have detailed schematics of the Anteverse with all their weaknesses circled in red pen, but we did the best we could!”

“No one's doubting that, Dr. Geiszler,” says someone blandly. “We're very grateful for your service.”

Hermann is so tense beside Newt that Newt has a vague mental image of his cane snapping under his bare hand. “But?” asks Hermann, acid.

“No ‘but,’ Doctor. We'll take your testimony into advisement as we move forward with our plans.”

“Into _advisement_ — you _are_ going to reinstate the Jaeger Program and fund further kaiju research, right?” Newt almost laughs. “That can't possibly be in question.”

The silence is deafening.

“... You can't be serious!” Newt demands, high and loud, very close to yelling at the leaders of the free world. He’s had an anti-establishment boner for this fantasy ever since the UN started de-funding shatterdomes and K-Science divisions in 2020, but he's taking very little pleasure from it at the moment, because: are you _serious_? "Didn't we just _learn_ this lesson?!"

The guy from the U.S. opens his mouth; Newt steamrolls him, which is made easier by the fact that the representative is somewhere in Anchorage standing in front of a dark backdrop, instead of standing in the room with them. “No!” Newt says. “Do you not get how much we have to learn from them?”

“Or,” says Hermann, “if I may, how close we came to being made extinct?”

Right: they’re probably more likely to respond to that argument. “You heard what Hermann said — if Stacker Pentecost hadn't disobeyed orders and gone totally guerrilla, there would've been a kaiju every eight hours, then four hours, then two, til there was a quadruple event every four minutes! And, oh, meanwhile, they'd be popping out babies the size of houses that can _eat people_ before the umbilical cord even detaches!!”

“We cannot afford to be unprepared, as a species, for the distinct possibility of the kaiju returning,” says Hermann, in that condescending lecture tone that Newt has always thought his students must have hated. _Newt_ certainly hates having it turned against him. “We have _no way_ of knowing whether they were fully destroyed—”

They get asked to leave.

They won't leave.

So they get thrown out.

* * *

When they’re firmly ushered outside by three MPs, Tendo Choi is standing in the corridor. Newt is distantly aware that Hermann is ranting in German, something that sounds like swearing (when you learn your German from your mom as a kid, you miss out on certain essential vocabulary), but Newt is too busy hollering back through the door to bother trying to translate.

“Went that well, huh?” Tendo says, when they slam the door in Newt’s face.

“They’re looking for excuses to avoid paying for the Jaeger Program,” seethes Hermann. “Of all the _asinine_ , short-sighted—”

Newt stops furiously pacing long enough to whirl on Tendo. “Does the marshal know about this?”

“Yep. Mako and Raleigh, too, and the chief technician. We’re all gonna testify about reinstating the program.”

“There’s a plan?” Hermann asks.

Tendo’s face isn’t encouraging. “Working on it,” he says, and then he goes in the door with a grim face and a perfect bowtie.

Newt looks at Hermann. “They've gotta continue the program,” he says. “There's no way they can't. I mean, the benefits to using Jaeger tech in civilian life alone—”

“The first country to start independently building a Jaeger, regardless of its intended purpose, will be seen as starting an arms race,” says Hermann. “It _must_ be the PPDC.”

He stops, and closes his mouth, eyeing Hermann. “Well, _that’s_ awful real-world for a guy who says politics are bullshit.”

“I spoke to my father this morning,” Hermann says. “That was straight from his mouth.”

Everything Newt knows about Hermann’s dad (which is, well, everything) flashes through his head in a split second. _Toy airplane, smothering expectations, the Wall of Life, a red tricycle, not speaking to that arschloch, a lifetime of disappointment, Mama's brittle smile at the dinner table..._

Newt stares at Hermann. Judging by that face and what Newt knows, it wasn’t a delightful father-son chat — his mouth is set in the familiar stubborn, downturned line.

“C'mon,” Newt finally says, exhaling. He waves his hand in the general direction of the lab. "I bet I've still got some of that rocket fuel the Russian techs distilled last month.”

“Is that supposed to be tempting?” Hermann scoffs, but it turns out that if they really have to start sorting out the lab, drunk is a decent way to start the process.

* * *

After another 13 hours of sleep and another hangover, Newt starts securing his favorite specimens for transit.

It's a good bet that they'll be moving no matter what, and he needs something to do with his hands. He's crawling out of his skin all over the lab, adjusting ammonia levels and debating the merits of various tanks with himself.

Hermann, meanwhile, is bugging the hell out of him, boxing up books and riding his ass about saving data or some shit. They get into a knock down, drag out fight over the ancient dried-up husks of kaiju matter that Hermann keeps finding in nooks and crannies as he cleans out his half of the lab. The insults grow loud enough that Raleigh Becket stops in the door and bellows, “ _HEY!_ ”

When they both stop and turn to look at him, he says, “ _Jesus_ ,” and turns to go.

“Hey— hey!” Newt calls. “Anything yet?”

“Nope,” says Raleigh, looking tired.

When he leaves, Newt goes back to hunting for his jar of preserved ocular nerves.

While digging through a crumpled box that had apparently been acting as a potential footrest under the desk that he never sits at, he hits a different jackpot. “Hey, check it out!” He lifts up the stack of forms with the PPDC official seal on them. “I thought I lost these."

“The _HR complaint claims_ that I filed against you?” Hermann asks. Newt can’t see him, since he’s sitting on the floor mostly under his desk, but he’s using that special tone that hovers somewhere between condescending, disbelieving, and completely disgusted.

“Yeah, I kept my favorites,” Newt says, rooting through the box. He spots one with a familiar-looking stain on it. He pulls it out and brushes it off. “You know, the ones I was really proud of.”

“That's perverse.”

“No, that's funny,” he says. “Subtle but important difference.” He skims the form in his hands and laughs. “ 'In a final unsanitary, unacceptable demonstration of his utter irresponsibility, Dr. Geiszler hung four-foot long segments of kaiju intestines from the laboratory ceiling, claiming that it was necessary for them to “air out”.' ”

Newt lightly taps the report and announces, “I'm gonna frame this.” 

“Uproarious,” Hermann mutters disdainfully.

Newt pops up on his knees and taps his workstation to life. “I think I saved a digital copy of the one wh...” He types his name and password into the system, then finds himself blinking at an error message. “Huh.”

He tries three more of his standard passwords. None of them work.

After about 30 seconds — 30 seconds of increasingly frantic typing that feel like a lifetime — Hermann’s voice says, “ _What_ are you doing?”

“I can't log in,” Newt says, his voice rising and keyboard speed increasing. “I can't get into my files; the system locked me out!” ‘Access denied,’ the red text says again. ‘Insufficient security permissions.’

He senses movement out of the corner of his eye, presumably Hermann pulling the nearest terminal over to himself and keying in his own user name and password, but he ignores it in favor of trying his old band’s first recorded single as his password. It doesn’t work.

“I was afraid of this,” Hermann says.

“Afraid of what, total systems failure?!”

“It isn't systems failure. They’ve decided the fate of the program.”

Newt goes cold and then hot, all at once. “It isn't — son of a _bitch_!” he explodes. “They can't do this!”

Hermann lowers his glasses from his nose and looks across the lab at him. 

“This is - this is 10 years of data and research; the stuff broadcast from Gipsy Danger’s sensors in the Anteverse _alone_ —” Newt hops up into a crouch, then stands up enough to hunch over the desk as he keeps typing. He is desperately trying every single username and password combination that he has ever used on any kind of system in the last 15 years, despite the fact that he knows that they won’t work. It helps to curb the tide of completely shitballs anxiety rising up like bile in the back of his throat.

He hears Hermann coming closer. “Newton. You didn't save backups?”

“ _Obviously_ I saved backups!” His tone would be much more poisonous if he wasn’t yelping with panic. “In like six secure places _on the server_!”

“Well,” says Hermann, leaning on the desk just beside him. He lowers his voice. “It's a good thing that _one_ of us was thinking.”

Newt freezes. In one move, he stands up straight and turns sharply, finding their faces inches apart, and Hermann puts a finger to his own lips with a significant glance up. Newt follows his look and stares up at the lab security cameras, which are pointed at the doors.

The pressure in Newt’s chest eases, just a little. “Your paranoia is, just, staggering. Do you; what did you—”

“My _caution_ has already been proved justified on one occasion, I'll remind you,” he says. Even quieter: “I have personal backups of every bit of work I've done at the PPDC, as well as the reports that we submitted, and when you ignored my comments this morning, I—” He has the grace to look the slightest bit embarrassed, “took the liberty of saving a copy of your entire drive—”

“Oh my god!” says Newt. “ _Oh_ my god! Hermann!!” Hermann shakes his head vehemently and frowns, exaggerated, and Newt takes his meaning. His paranoid-as-hell meaning: those security cameras don’t have _microphones_.

Right?

_Right?_

Newt pauses for a half a second. Then he yells at the top of his lungs, “I can't believe those douchebags think they can do this! What happened to respect for independent scientific inquiry?!”

Newt can, as Hermann has accused several times over the years (and Newt has always denied, for the sake of being contrary), totally yell on auto-pilot, without really paying attention to what’s flooding out of his mouth. He sets to it.

He has never, ever in his life been so grateful for another person’s total dysfunction. He’s not even mad that Hermann somehow got his password out of the Drift and went digging in his files. Ten years of dissections and bloodwork, DNA analysis and bioengineering research and theories, his entire life’s work — still his because Hermann got pissy at him and broke into his account.

For the second time in a week, Newt grabs Hermann in a frantic, exhilarated hug. Hermann goes stiff with surprise, but he recovers enough to awkwardly pat Newt’s side a couple times while Newt thumps his back. He has got to be one of the clumsiest huggers in the history of hugging.

Newt springs away and continues the serious business of working himself into an extremely vocal frenzy over knowledge theft and Big Brother. He even paces back and forth a couple times right in front of the security cameras, for dramatic effect. It’s not hard: he _is_ unbelievably pissed off; so angry he’s practically vibrating with it.

But he has their data, and they’re going to get it out.

The next time he passes Hermann, his arms full of beakers, Newt winks exaggeratedly in the middle of his tirade.

Despite what are obviously his very best efforts, his lips thinning, one side of Hermann's mouth tugs up.

* * *

So they decide to smuggle their research out of the Shatterdome, with what Newt is pretty sure is the tacit approval of Marshal Hanson and every single person on senior staff.

* * *

The night before their scheduled departures, Newt suggests more and more elaborate schemes, pacing back and forth in Hermann's room (which is seriously sparse, even by underground military base standards), until Hermann tells him to _get out_ because most people like to sleep between the hours of two and five a.m., and he shoves a protesting, half-heartedly fighting Newt out the door and slams it on him.

In the morning, Newt stands in a corridor. Staff was sent yesterday to confiscate all their remaining equipment, and he knows their bags have been searched, too, and it turns out that the final indignity is standing with outstretched arms while a hard-faced MP waves a wand over him.

“Seriously?” Newt says. “This is the thanks I get after ten years working here?” Jesus, he sounds like Hermann. “After saving humanity?!” Hopefully the MPs won’t think anything of the yelling or the way that his foot is jiggling. He has no idea where Hermann hid the data.

“It's standard exit procedure, Dr. Geiszler,” says the other MP, the Malaysian guy who always seemed to be on call to respond to reports of explosions in the lab (greatly exaggerated), and to reports by new personnel who were concerned that the doctors were going to murder each other.

“What do they think I'm gonna do, walk out with kaiju guts in my pockets?!”

“I wouldn't put it past you,” says Hermann, waiting his turn.

“Shut up, Hermann,” Newt says, but he notices that the MP who's more familiar with them, whose name Newt now wishes he'd learned in the interest of gathering goodwill, looks like he's trying not to laugh.

The other MP — Australian, by his accent — lowers the wand with a final beep and brusquely waves Hermann in.

“Am I clear? Am I free to go?” Newt asks sarcastically, and the guy totally ignores him.

“For the record, I also protest this shameful treatment,” says Hermann from behind Newt, presumably being scanned now. Newt turns a baleful look on the marginally more sympathetic MP.

“Sorry, Doc,” the guy says. “Rules are rules.”

There's an electronic screeching. Newt whips around to look at Hermann, who's blinking as the other MP hovers the wand over his left knee.

Suddenly, Newt knows where their data is.

He simultaneously wants to grin as hard as he can, and also jump out of his skin.

He settles for twitching where he stands.

The MP asks, “What's that?”

“ _Really_ , now,” Hermann says in a glorious display of peevishness, and he shoves his cane at the Australian. With his hands free, Hermann starts to hitch up his pant leg. He's wearing old man socks; of course he is. The cuff of his pants is too narrow to roll all the way up over something bulky on his knee — the bottom few inches that fit through the cuff are black Velcro straps. “Is that good enough for you?”

“That's fine, Dr. Gottlieb,” says the Malaysian MP, looking a little guilty, to Newt's eye, but the Australian still stares dubiously. Newt’s heart is trying really hard to escape through his mouth.

“Fine!” snaps Hermann. “I sacrificed my health to 10 years in the PPDC; I may as well sacrifice my dignity as well!” He furiously goes for his belt, and all three of them yelp, “ _No!_ ”

“No!” says the big Australian in a rush; “no, you don't have to do that, Doctor.” He looks shamefaced. All these years working together and Newt never knew: Hermann is a diabolical genius. “Sorry, you're free to go.” The MP steps back. “You're both free to go.”

“Thank you,” Hermann says icily. It’s just about the meanest thing Newt has ever heard; it’s amazing. It actually takes the big guy a flustered second to remember to hand back the cane.

Genius aside, Newt sees what he recognizes as a genuine wince when Hermann bends to pick up his bag. “I got it, I got it,” he says, and he grabs both Hermann's bag and his own messier duffel.

“Safe travels, Doctors,” says the friendlier MP.

“Yeah, whatever, you too, whatever,” says Newt distractedly, and he jogs after Hermann, who's motoring down the hall.

“Not a word,” says Hermann out of the corner of his mouth, and Newt waits until they've turned three corners and the elevator doors have closed before he can't hold it anymore and he starts laughing.

“That was epic!” he crows, pounding Hermann on the back. He effects his favorite (inaccurate, but whatever) dramatic Hermann imitation, still bubbling over with laughter: “I've sacrificed 10 years of my health to the PPDC, I might as well sacrifice my dignity!!”

Hermann isn't even trying to pretend he isn't satisfied; he's outright grinning, which still looks so wrong on his grumpy face, even after the five hours they’d spent drinking with the LOCCENT techs on V-K Day (before the horrified medical staff found them and hauled them off for testing). Even after Drifting and seeing the entirety of his life in the span of a few seconds, it's not right. Hermann just isn’t a grinner.

Much more easily than he had in front of the MPs, Hermann tucks his cane under his arm and rolls up his pant leg, and he pulls a data stick out from under the bottom edge of the knee brace he’s wearing.

“I gotta admit, didn't think you had subterfuge in you,” says Newt, as Hermann adjusts the brace and then fussily fixes his pant leg.

“I have tremendous respect for independent scientific inquiry,” Hermann says, proving once and for all that he _does_ pay attention to what Newt says. He straightens up and shoots Newt a look that's dangerously close to a genuine smile. He offers his hand. When Newt glances down, he sees the data stick tucked into his palm. Newt fumblingly accepts the hand-off, and then glances up again.

Hermann's smile has faded, and not into his usual cartoon-character scowl.

There's something unexpectedly somber about the moment — a goodbye to somebody who Newt has been working with, on and off, for the better part of a decade; someone who, if he's honest with himself, he has a lot of respect for. It’s like everything they’ve accomplished in the last ten years has been compressed to fit inside a lump of plastic and circuitry the size of Newt’s pinkie. He looks down at the data stick again, then carefully tucks it inside his jacket.

Hermann shifts his weight, and clears his throat in a way that Newt used to think was pretentious. He _still_ thinks it’s pretentious but he also knows now that Hermann does it when he’s nervous. “You could—” Hermann says, and Newt cuts off the gruff awkward offer, ignores it, before Hermann can get it out of his mouth.

Newt says, “Respect for scientific inquiry? Says the guy who refuses to accept the _obvious fact_ that the kaiju were being cloned.”

It's like flipping a switch. “It's not a refusal to accept; it's asking a simple bloody question! If they were being fully reproduced via cloning, why was it necessary for Otachi to be pregnant?!”

This is how life is supposed to be. It’s definitely better than talking about the fact that Hermann’s going to London, and Newt _said_ he was going to the beach somewhere in southeast Asia but actually plans to travel country-to-country to incite a global arms race.

“Clonal reproduction! Or maybe just good old evolution!” Newt retorts, half-aware that the elevator doors have opened on the rooftop landing pad and it’s pouring outside. “Every generation was bigger, badder, and more advanced; why _wouldn’t_ cat 4's and 5's evolve the capability to breed?”

“ _YO!_ ” someone roars, and they look up to find a man in uniform, helmet and headset on, standing in the rain in front of them, looking unimpressed, like he has tried to get their attention several times. Across the pad, a helicopter is powering up. “Is one of you two Dr. Gottlieb or what?”

Hermann does that fidgety thing that he does whenever he stands up straighter. “I'm Dr. Gottlieb.”

“Then I'm your ride,” shouts the man, over the sound of the rotors spinning faster and faster, “and we're late, so let's book it.” He reaches out and Newt hands over the heavier of the two bags. Christ even knows what Hermann has in there. Probably nothing but books.

They follow the helicopter crew member out into the cold rain, Hermann trying to hold the furry hood of his parka over his face and Newt just accepting the fact that he's going to get soaked to the skin.

“If the Precursors are so all-knowing, why would they allow something so superfluous in their creations?” Hermann shouts, picking their argument right back up again.

“Didn’t you watch _Jurassic Park_ when you were a kid?” Newt yells back. “Nature finds a way, dude!”

“The sheer inefficiency of it—”

“Did you get four doctorates in biology when I wasn’t paying attention?!”

“Better than the actual biologist who's citing 30-year-old films as scientific evidence!” Hermann shouts over his shoulder as Newt trails him through a particularly narrow passage between two cargo trucks.

“It was an _example_ ; obviously there's—” he's saying, and then they emerge from between the trucks. The helicopter is right there, powering up.

The wind threatens to rip Newt's glasses right off his face. It feels like it steals the words out of his mouth, too. He looks at Hermann and his stupid furry coat.

As the crew member escorting them crosses the last 20 feet to the chopper, Hermann turns to Newt, switches his cane to his left hand, and offers his right. He's given up on holding the hood of his coat and it's flying in the wind, along with flyaway wet pieces of his hair. “Dr. Geiszler,” he shouts, with an air of finality to it.

Newt looks at him, for a minute, and then the corners of his mouth rise. He shakes Hermann's hand, hard, and shouts back, “Dr. Gottlieb.”

Hermann nods to him and then he turns away and walks to the Jumphawk. It takes the crew a minute to get the hatch closed behind him, so for that minute, Newt can watch him settling himself in the jump seat.

“End of an era, man!” he shouts on impulse. Hermann frowns, clearly unable to hear above the roar of the rotors and the wind and the waves, and the door closes on his 'what the hell is the matter with you?' face. It seems appropriate.

Newt waits til the chopper's in the air and out over the water before he waves, once.

When the helicopter is a tiny black speck on the horizon, he looks out across Victoria Harbor toward the hazy outline of the coast. Somewhere through the rain and the fog, Hong Kong is buzzing, putting itself back together.

A day or two of vacation somewhere warm does sound nice, right about now, but after that — Newt almost laughs to himself, self-satisfied. He's got a hot date, and you don't leave the Chinese government waiting.


End file.
